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As ScreenJunkies snarkily wisely noted in "Honest Trailers - X-Men Trilogy":

In the world where people cheer the Fantastic Four, Avengers, Spider-Man, those same people will inexplicably hate the X-Men.

Why is that so? AFAIK, all these superheroes exist in the same exact comic universe, yet X-Men seem to always be significantly more disliked.

The question is primarily about comics, but if X-Men movies are part of MCU, I will accept an answer from MCU as well, since after all it was inspired in second degree by the movies.

Valorum
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DVK-on-Ahch-To
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    Please note that I'm strongly prefering IN-universe answer, e.g. simplistic "mutants in X-men are meant to be write-ins for gays" out of universe isn't what I'm after. – DVK-on-Ahch-To Sep 06 '14 at 23:12
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    X-Men isn't part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (at least not yet; do you have something to tell us?) – Izkata Sep 06 '14 at 23:23
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    Aside, I'd guess that it's distrust of mutants in general, not simply the X-Men. The other named superheroes, there's only 1 of each, so there's some (limited) level of accountability. Mutants on the other hand can be anyone anywhere with any powers. – Izkata Sep 06 '14 at 23:24
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    I don't know if the animated series (1990's?) is canon, but Spiderman dropped in on the X-Men at Xavier's school at least once. – Joe L. Sep 06 '14 at 23:32
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    Honestly, it is the bad press, coupled with the constant assaults of mutant superbads (Magneto, Apocalypse) boasting how mutants will replace humanity (which causes distress among humans not blessed with amazing mutant abilities) or the collateral damage from giant robots screaming at the top of their lungs "Mutant detected. Exterminate the mutant." Then they proceed to destroy the mutant AND the city block he was standing on. This does not lend good PR to mutant/human relations. If I were a human, I would hate to see any known mutant coming. Trouble follows along with them. – Thaddeus Howze Sep 07 '14 at 00:02
  • @Izkata - I am totally unfamiliar with MCU - still didn't scare up time to watch even a single one of them. Don't mistake ignorance for gnostic information :) – DVK-on-Ahch-To Sep 07 '14 at 13:05
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    Does anyone have any canonical evidence that the X-Men live in the same universe as these other superheroes? I always assumed they were separate. – Harry Johnston Sep 07 '14 at 23:29
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    Spiderman is pretty hated. – jpmc26 Sep 08 '14 at 04:21
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    @HarryJohnston For comics, see "Who else is both an X-man and an Avenger?". For the movies, they are separate (hence my first comment). – Izkata Sep 08 '14 at 04:22
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    @jpmc26 - only the really whiny useless one played by Tony McGuire – DVK-on-Ahch-To Sep 08 '14 at 09:09
  • @JoeL. Why wouldn't that series be canon? – TylerH Sep 08 '14 at 14:20
  • @TylerH: The comics/graphic novel scene has gotten so bizzarley complex, with all the reboots, generations, 52's and I-don't-know-what's, I have no idea what's in or out of canon. Frankly, I gave up on it all a long time ago. I haven't bought a comic book since Howard the Duck was cancelled. – Joe L. Sep 08 '14 at 14:29
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    @DVK lol. I was referring to Jameson and others like him. At least in the old '90s animated series, even Aunt May thought Spiderman was a menace. (Not sure if that shows up in the comics.) – jpmc26 Sep 08 '14 at 15:20
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    @DVK - From what I've heard about it from the immortal Stan Lee, the X Men were supposed to be an analogy for the Civil Rights movement of the 60's, not so much gay people (although that analogy became more fitting in recent years). – Wad Cheber Jun 26 '15 at 01:17
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    Speculation: For the most part, other superheroes became superhuman, often because of an accident or some other unforeseen events. Mutants are born mutants. Parents fear that their kids will be born "different". Mutants reinforce this fear. Other superheroes are unique and isolated cases. Mutants are becoming more and more common. Therefore, whereas other heroes might be disliked, mutants stoke the inherent fear humans have of being replaced or surpassed by something better than us. – Wad Cheber Jun 26 '15 at 02:05

7 Answers7

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It’s the tyranny of evolution. Sooner or later, you have a species that will have a genetic or technological advantage and that species will always conquer a species without that advantage. Carthage, the triumph of the Homo sapiens over the Neanderthal showed us that. Now what do we have? We have Homo superior versus Homo sapiens. On a level playing field, Homo superior wins every time.

That is a quote by the character Wade in season 4 of Babylon 5, explaining why he believed all telepaths in that universe needed to be either murdered or enslaved for use by “normals” (homo sapiens). The same guidelines clearly apply in the Marvel Universe.

For all their power, the Fantastic Four are not the future of humanity. They will not outcompete, enslave, or otherwise marginalise the human race. Neither is Spider Man. Nor are most of the Avengers. Even people like Captain America, who could theoretically be the first of many super-soldiers with better-than-human abilities, is only that way because he was artificially made that way. Whether by accident or design, most meta-humans in the Marvel Universe are like this. Others, such as Dr Strange or Tony Stark, are usually regular humans who gained their fantastic abilities through hard work, dedication, and sometimes simple luck. While there may be reason to fear such people, there's no reason to fear what they represent to humanity.

Mutants are different. They are the future of humanity; sooner or later, all humans will be mutants. As such, they are a clear and present danger to humanity. The only way to prevent mutants from someday replacing humanity is to kill them. And mutants know this. So even if humans decide to be friendly and peaceful, many mutants will still seek to kill or enslave them for their own protection, as well as the future protection of their offspring. Knowing this, humans are encouraged to act the same way.

This is a conflict that can never, ever be resolved, except by the extinction of one or both parties. It is a writer's dream, as the potential for conflict is unparalleled. There is no long-term threat to the human race posed by Tony Stark; even if he creates a thousand Iron Men and turns them into his private army, he's just a more-powerful than usual human dictator. Someone like the Hulk is an individual; while he may threaten the human race, he can't really change it into something else. Mutants are changing the human race every day, and they may not even know it. Unless you've had extensive genetic testing done, you may well be a mutant; you just don't know it yet. You can't tell them apart by looking at them, you'll never know if your best friend, daughter, or wife is a mutant unless they tell you or you catch them in the act of using their powers, and with every generation, more and more of the human population will be comprised of mutants.

It's the tyranny of evolution, and there are very legitimate reasons to hate and fear it. While it is unfair to transfer that hate and fear onto individual mutants, it is human nature. And mutant nature. After all, they're not different from humans; they are humans. Just better. And nothing can kill or enslave humans more effectively than a better breed of human. Ask Carthage.

alexwlchan
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James Sheridan
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    Which just raises the question of why more mutants don't just pretend to not be mutants. –  Sep 07 '14 at 01:02
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    @Keen Nightcrawler: Then why not stay in disguise all the time? You know, look like everyone else. Mystique: Because we shouldn't have to. – phantom42 Sep 07 '14 at 01:16
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    That's not always an option. Also, why should they hide what they are? After all they are a stand-in for gays. – James Sheridan Sep 07 '14 at 01:17
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    @phantom42 Oh I meant more like pretending to be a non-mutant superhero. "Oh, I got these powers after being bitten by a radioactive worm!" –  Sep 07 '14 at 01:26
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    @Keen: It's harder to fight for gay rights if you're pretending to be straight the whole time, isn't it? – James Sheridan Sep 07 '14 at 01:29
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    @JamesSheridan Not everyone wants to fight. :-/ On another note, I always thought that the specifics of Marvel's mutant characters fit more as allegories for racism or sexism. There's no Malcom X/Magneto of gay rights that I know of. –  Sep 07 '14 at 02:27
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    @Keen: Yeah, but I bet the only reason Peter Parker is able to become Spider-Man is that he's a mutant with the power to absorb the abilities of any radioactive animals that bite him. – ruakh Sep 07 '14 at 04:35
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    "will be comprised of mutants." - You mean "will comprise mutants." A collection comprises the things it contains, not the other way around. – wavemode Sep 07 '14 at 05:53
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    I don't see the problem in becoming a mutant. – plocks Sep 07 '14 at 05:56
  • I will accept if you provide some in-universe evidence (i assume it exists) that mutant gene is actually a threat in evolutionary terms. E.g. is it an inherited genetic change? Dominant? – DVK-on-Ahch-To Sep 07 '14 at 09:47
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    At least on other occasions on B5, non-telepathic humans were occasionally referred to as "mundanes" by telepaths, which sounds even more condescendive than "normals". – O. R. Mapper Sep 07 '14 at 11:08
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    @DVK: It's definitely an inherited genetic change; see all the mutants who are also the children of mutants, such as Scarlet Witch and Quiksilver to Magneto. I am unsure of whether or not it is dominant. Presumably not; Graydon Creed was the son of Sabretooth and Mystique, yet not a mutant. The X-factor gene seems to follow the science of genetics as closely as non-scientist writers can. I'd scare up more info for you, but it's 11:20PM on my daughter's birthday, so needless to say, I'm too tired to do so right now. – James Sheridan Sep 07 '14 at 13:21
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    @Keen: The comics were obviously an allegory to the civil rights movement at the time they were developed. The films pay more attention to gay rights, likely because racism in America has been completely solved. – James Sheridan Sep 07 '14 at 13:23
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    @JamesSheridan Actually, your example with Creed proves the X gene is not recessive (ie, dominant or one of the more complicated variants). If it were recessive, Sabretooth and Mystique would both have to have it twice to be mutant, meaning any child they had would be guaranteed to get it from both sides, and thus be mutant. With dominant, Sabretooth and Mystique could both by heterozygous mutants, with a 1 in 4 chance of a non-mutant kid. The probability of such non-mutant offspring being much lower than 1:4 indicates it works more like eye color, though, with several actual genes involved. – Matthew Najmon Sep 07 '14 at 15:03
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    "likely because racism in America has been completely solved." What world do you live in? – phantom42 Sep 07 '14 at 18:49
  • Excellent answer. This is by far the biggest reason why. However I'd like to add that there is also an element of rogue to the X-men which I think contributes, which definitely originates in the reasons already given, but which exasperates it a little. X-men are more of a closed community than the other super groups, far less public. Wolverine is probably the most famous marvel anti-hero. X-men skirt the line more often than the idealistic and upbeat Avengers and FF. – Nacht Sep 08 '14 at 07:05
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    @phantom42: It's called sarcasm. – James Sheridan Sep 08 '14 at 08:28
  • @MatthewNajmon: Thank you. It's many years since high school biology. – James Sheridan Sep 08 '14 at 08:34
  • What about the possible influence of epigenetics? Then it could be dominant or recessive but still not manifest without certain specific triggers to activate the otherwise dormant genetic expression. – Aviose Sep 08 '14 at 15:41
  • @MatthewNajmon Adding on to that, significant mutations of the sort the X-Men would have are commonly dominant, because they are often creating a protein that was not being created before. Mutations that break a protein tend to be recessive or mixed effect, as if you have 50% correctly working proteins and 50% wrongly working ones, you get some effect - but if it's a make-protein gene, often just having one copy is enough to have the effect. (Obviously, X-Men mutations are somewhat of a special case as they in many cases would require several genes, but that's the idea.) – Joe Sep 08 '14 at 19:11
  • "You can't tell them apart by looking at them" Well, most of them. Some of them are quite obviously... different. :) – Brian S Sep 08 '14 at 19:18
  • Gotta love Stack Exchange. Get 74 upvotes, and some idiot has to downvote just to be cool. Two such idiots, in this case. And explaining the downvote would ruin their hip image. – James Sheridan Sep 08 '14 at 23:02
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    @JamesSheridan "It's harder to fight for gay rights if you're pretending to be straight the whole time, isn't it?" - Actually not, because of the whole "us vs them" mentality. It's much harder to dismiss an argument when its being made by someone like yourself – Izkata Sep 08 '14 at 23:16
  • @Izkata: Pretence implies shame and hypocrisy. You're likely to alienate your own side in the argument. Witness the number of gay people rolling their eyes at Ian Thorpe recently. – James Sheridan Sep 09 '14 at 06:47
  • I agree. It is about human/non-human co-existance. X-men are deceptively judged as equal to men but are different, better and compete with humans for natural selection. Not ending humanity is not a choice for X-men, it will happen eventually. Superhumans on the other hand are better than humans, are clearly apart from them and don't have to compete with them. Their choice to threaten humanity is by their own will. – user568109 Sep 09 '14 at 07:33
  • What about the Fantastic Four? They are mutants in every sense of the word. They weren't born with their powers, but Sue and Reed passed on mutant abilities to their son. From the first X-Men movie it seems as a given that when congress was forcibly given powers they would be treated as mutants. What is the difference if the mutation was caused by exposure to a cosmic storm or by a random genetic change? – Jason Goemaat Sep 10 '14 at 20:48
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    @JasonGoemaat: The Fantastic Four's children may be mutants, but they are not considered mutants by the general public in the Marvel Universe due to the fact that they got their powers from an outside source. Just because that source seems to have activated a previously inactive X-gene in their system does not mean the public considers them mutants. Much like racism, public ignorance and stupidity is also something that no longer exists in America. Also, that movie was terrible. – James Sheridan Sep 10 '14 at 23:07
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    @JamesSheridan - It still doesn’t make a ton of sense. Any inheritance that happens with mutants seems to happen with regular superheroes, too (taken to extremes; e.g. I’m fairly sure Cyborg’s daughter in DC is also a cyborg in at least one continuity). And then you have groups like the Inhumans.... The issue is less that people wouldn’t be ignorant enough to hate mutants, but rather quite the opposite - that it’s extraordinary that, in all that ignorance, they’re able to make the incredibly fine distinction between mutants, mutate, and who knows what else. – Adamant Mar 28 '18 at 20:31
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It's partially media, partially paranoia, and an enhanced sense of xenophobia, coupled with the constant assaults of mutant superbads (Magneto, Apocalypse) boasting how mutants will replace humanity. Add to that, the collateral damage from giant robots shouting "Mutant detected. Exterminate the mutant" then destroying the mutant AND the city block he was standing on. This does not lend good PR to mutant/human relations.

A person living in the Marvel Universe has a life very different from yours and mine. His world is an uncertain one.

  • One day he is on his way to work and there is suddenly an invasion of Kree warriors bent on battling the Avengers right on the freeway he's driving over. The battle ties up traffic for hours, costing him money and prestige at his job. Hundreds of people are injured in the collateral damage of buildings and cars being destroyed.

  • A month later, after they managed to repair the bridge, the Mole man ventures up from his subterranean lair and battles the Fantastic Four. Mr. Average's car is destroyed as one of the Mole Man's monsters trudges through the city before being put down by Ben Grimm. Hundreds of people are injured or even killed.

  • Three months after that Mr. Average, riding the bus to work now, finds his bus under attack as a powerful and hidden mutant is riding the bus with him, in disguise. Mr. Average escapes with a few burns and a deep abiding fear of giant robots which randomly attack buses full of normal people to reach "dangerous" mutants.

enter image description here

Mass Hysteria

Every day after each attack news pundits like J. Jonah Jameson espouse about the dangers of mutants, Spider-Man and superheroes in general. But mutants catch special flack because they could be anyone. You. Your neighbors, the person on the bus next to you could be a mutant.

  • Hysteria is a powerful tool in a world where uncertainty is fanned by fear-promoting pundits and the threat of attack is a regular event at least once every Marvel year, somewhere on the planet. See: Kree-Skrull War, Galactus, Invasion of the Skrulls, Shuma Gorath, Magneto and his Acolytes, Apocalypse, etc.

  • Look how powerful hysteria is on our modern Earth when the random threat of terrorism is used to manipulate how people feel about other HUMANS. We created the Patriot Act, we dropped bombs on foreign countries for the FEAR of terrorism. The single act of the destruction of the World Trade Center over a decade ago STILL has people in the grip of fear.

  • Now imagine you had events like this happening every year, some of them, not all of them are due to the mysterious mutants living among us, with fantastic powers capable of wiping out all of humanity with the blink of an eye, (so the news media sells it, no matter that it in the case of certain mutants is actually TRUE).

A Legitimate Fear of Incredible Power

As an individual without fantastic powers and a need to go to work, protect your family, pay your taxes, be a decent individual and maintain a role in society, the very fact that you may feel insignificant compared to the mutant superbeing carrying away the stadium you were hoping to watch tonight's baseball game in undermines your self esteem, hell, your very sanity as you see the impossible being done before your very eyes.

enter image description here

  • Imagine Mr. Average learns the person carrying away your stadium is a mutant, a being who was born this way and whose probably manifested as a teenager. He has a twelve year old daughter and a ten year old son. Could this happen to him? Is it possible that his children could have this mutant gene you hear so much misinformation about?

  • What about that town that was blown off the map out there when those Young Warriors fought that criminal Nitro? Everyone was killed. Could that happen here? Should mutants and superbeings be registered? (See: Civil War)

  • Maybe Strucker has the right idea. Maybe the best thing that could happen is we kill all the mutants before they take over the world. (Not knowing that it has already happened more than once and been reversed; See: House of M). Being an ordinary human in this world would be a terrifying experience akin to living in a warzone where you had no options but to run and hide whenever anything happened.

We Have Seen the Enemy...

Why do mutants have it worse than the rest of the metahuman community?

  • Most of the metahuman community makes an effort to be seen as being on the same side as normal humans. At least some of them have been revealed to be normal humans (Tony Stark, Hawkeye, Black Widow) resemble normal humans (Thor) or were once normal humans (the Hulk).

  • But mutants were born this way, their appearances vary wildly, along with their powers, many in learning to control their powers, harm innocents and even if they become "good" mutants have blood on their hands. When they are evil mutants, they seem to relish their powers and kill without reservation. There are reports (however unreliable) that more mutants are being born every day.

enter image description here

What is a normal man to do in a world where the uncertainty of his very existence depends on a very thin line of metahumans to protect him from the ever-growing menace of mutant power on an Earth in an ever-expanding hostile universe of threats. Aliens, gods, intelligent machines are terrifying but they are the Other.

Mutants? They are us. And they are everywhere. There is no where to run...

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Thaddeus Howze
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    yeah this is a good example...i really like this...you could say paranoid and xenophobia though... –  Sep 08 '14 at 02:00
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I should begin by admitting that there is a considerable amount of speculation involved in this answer. However, this speculation, as far as I can see, is consistent with the storylines from the Marvel Universe.

For the most part, other superheroes became superhuman, often because of an accident or some other unforeseen events. For example, Spider-man was a normal person until he was bitten by a radioactive spider. The Hulk was a normal person until he was exposed to a high dosage of gamma radiation.

Mutants, on the other hand, are born mutants. Parents fear that their kids will be born "different". Mutants reinforce this fear. No one knows why babies are suddenly being born with these mutations and superpowers, but it is becoming more prevalent all the time. Parents who don't hate mutants themselves would still be upset if their kids were born as mutants, because they will be subjected to ridicule, discrimination, and even violence. And of course, there is a good chance that they may turn out to be the bad kind of mutant - more Magneto than Xavier (although most people don't make much of a distinction between the two).

Other superheroes are unique and isolated cases. There is no possibility that the world will be overwhelmed by billions of Spider-men. There won't be a million Hulks or Thors or Iron Men or whatever. They are remarkable because they are rare, and they are rare because they only exist due to some sort of mishap or unanticipated event. People in New York might not like Spider-man very much, but they also don't worry about Spider-men taking over the world.

Mutants, on the other hand, are becoming more and more common. The trend of mutant children is, if anything, increasing. There are more mutants being born every day (or at least every month or year). Therefore, whereas other heroes might be disliked, mutants stoke the inherent fear humans have of being replaced or surpassed by something better than us.

Turning to supervillains, they usually work as individuals or small groups. The only thing that makes them occasionally team up is a specific shared objective, which is generally quite temporary in nature. Once they beat their opponents or get what they came for, they go their separate ways. Furthermore, when the bad guys show up, it is pretty easy to tell who is bad and who is good - the good guys are the ones trying to stop the bad guys, and they have little or nothing in common aside from their superpowers.

Mutants, on the other hand, are split into two groups, good guys and bad guys, but to outside observers, they're all just mutants. For whatever reason, people have trouble seeing any difference between the two sides. A big part of this dynamic is probably the influence of the media: as I understand it, the press generally says "some mutants destroyed half the city" or whatever, not "the evil mutants aligned with Magneto were thwarted by the X Men in their attempt to take over the city". Chances are that if the fight was between Thor and Loki, the press would say "Loki tried to take over the city, but Thor stopped him".

All of these factors combined give us the situation you described: people hate and fear mutants far more than they do other superheroes.

Wad Cheber
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I think that mutants have that feeling of "master race" behind them. They get their powers from a common source, so people instinctively feel like they are a monolithic enemy. So they do what they can to keep mutants down. Now people who get powers from another source. That's different. I think people see that as similar to winning the lottery. They don't want to do anything to harm those guys because they all dream of the day that a freak nuclear mishap will give them powers as well.

I have also heard that it was a deliberate choice by Marvel, to show the irrationality of prejudice.

BillionSix
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Mutants are hated because they are feared, and they are feared due to their pottential for growth and overturning the status quo.

Every other superhero is either the result of a freak extraordinary events which will never ever happen again (mutant spider bite, suriviving a cosmic storm) but mutants are the result of something that happens all the time, people having children.

Let's say the chanche of suriving a cosmic storm and gaining powers is 0.000000000000000001 and the chanche of being a mutant is ten thousand times lower. the number of children being born is so much higher than the number of space flights that mutants will allways increase faster than FF knock-offs.

That was growth but now let's talk about threats to the status quo, most hero's would be on the top even without their powers Reed Richards would have just been a world renowned genius, Tony Stark would have been just a bilionare/briliant engineer Charles Xavier would have been just a genetics professor with a huge trust fund.

People are ok with these guys being above them due to their powers because even without them they would be the elite, but mutation can strike anywhere the poorest,most looked down upon of society could pottentialy rise to the top with powers.

Anyone who considers that he/she beenfits form the current power structure would be afraid, there's also the more personal threat that their children could develop at adolescence powers which would remove any force their parents could exert.

George Bora
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It's perhaps worth revisiting this, given Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season four.

In the actual MCU, we see that Inhumans (not the ones from Attilan) receive the same sort of treatment as mutants do in the X-Men "cinematic universe" (for want of a better term).

As is true of mutants, someone can be an Inhuman without anyone realizing it. While it should logically be a genetic trait, we've seen siblings (the anti-Inhuman Senator and her brother) where one proves to be inhuman and the other apparently does not.

In the comics, we've seen similar dread of NuHumans (members of the general populace who prove to have Inhuman ancestry) as we see of mutants. With terrigenesis stopped (for now at least), much of that may go away; dread of mutants remains.

In the comics, there certainly have been stories where all people with powers were mistrusted - most notably (but not exclusively) the original CIVIL WAR storyline.

The origins of characters like Spider-Man are not publicly known, thus there are probably those in the MU who believe he is a mutant - and many who don't trust him, regardless.

(Just to cover it somewhere: the out-of-universe reason why mutants will always be hated is that they fill in for whatever group the creators feel is most hated without reason in society as a whole. Over the years, you can see parallels to the current "hated and feared" group. This aspect of things got played up much more strongly during the Claremont years. The legacy virus, for example, hit the mutant community hard around the time the HIV virus was hitting the gay community. Recently, there have been talks about deporting mutants, when undocumented immigrants are a major political issue.)

RDFozz
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Super heroes are always , by definition working for the good of mankind, whereas mutants are often evil or neutral. Besides, mutants are viewed as unnatural. Super heroes are often in the public eye, whereas mutants are often secretive. Also, many superheroes are often mistrusted or disliked.

Samalot
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